Lionel Asbo: State of England (34 page)

Still, there were times that stayed in Desmond’s mind. Like that Saturday morning, early on, when Lionel was accompanied by one of his dogs (Jak). He didn’t say hello. Man and animal went within, and the bedroom door remained quarter open for an utterly silent hour. Then the Pepperdines glimpsed the slab of his suit in the passage and the dog giving them a haunted glance over its shoulder.

‘She’s not normal, is she,’ he said. ‘She never cries. And she sleeps through the night. They’re not meant to do that.’

Cilla proudly slept through the night in what they called her
perch
: the hip-high trestle table with raised sides, like a clothes drawer on legs. In this flanked hollow her basket lay.

‘Well of course she’s not normal. She’s nearly two months behind. She’s a
young
baby. But you’re right.’

‘She’s not normal. Have you ever heard her cry?’

Cilla’s first smile was scheduled for thirteen weeks – or so, at least, the baby books had warned. But Dawn imposed a ban on baby books (which her husband didn’t fully observe). They waited.

And what was this? In the fourth week she straightened her neck, more or less, and began to take a shrewd interest in baby books of her own (principally
Mr Man
); in the fifth, she made cooing sounds and, coached by Dawn, became near-fluent in motherese; in the sixth, she could brandish a rattle; and in the seventh …

That was a smile
, they were always saying.
No it wasn’t. That was wind. A windy smile
… That
was a smile. No it wasn’t. That was a yawn. A yawny smile
.

And then, in the seventh week, she smiled – irrefutably. You suddenly knew what an extraordinary thing a smile was, how kaleidoscopically it transformed the eyes.

‘She wasn’t prem,’ Dawn decided. ‘She was ready. Her body was little but her mind was ready. She was
bored
inside. That’s all.’

And once she started smiling – she couldn’t stop.

‘It’s not normal,’ he said.

‘She’s just pleased to be here.’

‘But she smiles at
everyone
.’

This was true. On the street, in the park – Diston seemed to be incapable of coming up with anyone that she didn’t immediately and passionately admire.

‘Des, she’s not normal.’

‘No.’

‘She’s fabulous.’

‘She is,’ he said. ‘She’s magic … But it’s not normal for a baby to smile like that. All the time.’

‘There. Listen. She’s crying! You say she never cries – and she’s crying.
Now
are you happy?’

‘… She’s not crying. She’s singing!’

But it is common, it is everyday, it is normal. Hear the vans? ‘Hush, Little Baby’, ‘Star Light, Star Bright’, ‘Golden Slumbers Kiss Your Eyes’, ‘Hark, Hark, the Dogs Do Bark’, ‘What Are Little Girls Made Of?’ … If it’s true what they say, if it’s true that happiness writes white, then decency insists that we withdraw, passing over to the three of them a quire – no, a ream – of blank pages.

XX

NOTHING REALLY OUT of the ordinary happened between October 2012 and July 2013.

Marlon’s brother Charlton was arrested after an altercation with his mother, Mercy Welkway (in the course of which she broke her hip). That same week Ringo was given another three months for Benefits Fraud. Horace Sheringham, these days, was in and out of various clinics and hospitals (and in and out of various pubs and bars and off-licences and supermarkets). Come the New Year, fate would install him at Diston General (where, ipso facto, he only had a seventy-eight per cent chance of getting out alive). According to Prunella, Horace had
no intention whatsoever
of reconsidering his stand on Dawn.

Lionel Asbo, during this period, attracted the attention of the press on several counts – an intrusion at ‘Wormwood Scrubs’, for example, which gave rise to lively public debate. But it was the dullest and feeblest of these stories (the idlest, the tritest) that proved to be by far the most transformative …

In early autumn Sebastian Drinker announced that Lionel was probably going to take a financial interest in West Ham United Football Club. The season was by then in its seventh week, and the Hammers had yet to win a point or even score a goal. From the directors’ box at Upton Park (unaccompanied by ‘Threnody’, who was still bedridden with grief) Lionel witnessed the monotonous calamities in east London; but he also witnessed the monotonous calamities in stadiums as far flung as Stoke, Bolton, Portsmouth, Sunderland … And the following morning you’d see, on the back page of your Sunday tabloid, a foggy photo of the dripping car park at, say, Wigan Athletic, with Lionel sorrowfully finishing his meat pie and his mug of Bovril before scaling the charcoal Venganza (or bending into his new Ferrari). By October, the credits of
Match of the Day
were closing with a clip of Lionel as he shuffled from the ground, in slow motion, to the strains of the lugubrious West Ham anthem, ‘I’m Forever Blowing Bubbles’:
I’m forever blowing bubbles, Pretty bubbles in the air, They fly so high, nearly reach the sky, Then like my dreams they fade and die
… And so Lionel became a kind of national symbol of intransigence, of peculiarly English intransigence in the face of relentlessly blighted hopes.

Which was the more unexpected, because Lionel always insisted that he didn’t
give a fuck about football. Basically
, he often used to say,
only cunts give a fuck about football
. Maybe, Des thought, maybe Lionel supported West Ham just to get out of the house – or maybe he took a Lionel pleasure in drinking in the pain of thousands upon thousands … Anyway, the running story on Lionel Asbo and West Ham United was soon at least partly overshadowed by weightier concerns – not least the attempted burglary in Short Crendon, which became known, in the spring of 2013, as the Case of the Chav Chauffeur.

Cilla’s eyes turned from blue to brown. This they had been told to expect. But then she developed another abnormality … Her parents stared. Des said,

‘It’s like the way the royal family wave. During parades.’

‘Yeah. As if they’re unscrewing a lightbulb.’

‘But she’s doing it
fast
. With one in each hand!’

This was Cilla’s latest initiative: she’d raise her wrists to head height and wiggle them in swift rotations. She couldn’t stop doing that either – while of course still smiling. Dawn said,

‘Like that black-face singer. Al Jolson! … Oh, Des, what have we done to deserve this?’

‘You know, we’re duty-bound to have another. I mean not now, but … We’re duty-bound.’

‘We are. It might be another Cilla.’

She spent most weekdays in the vast crèche at St Swithin’s, where she hobnobbed with the innumerable babies of the schoolmarms and the schoolgirls.

And her eyes turned imperceptibly from blue to brown.

During the winter quarter Grace Pepperdine received three sets of visitors at Cape Wrath … Lionel and ‘Threnody’ went up there first, in late November, as was duly recorded in the
Sun
, the
Star
, the
Mail
, and the
Daily Telegraph
. Lionel’s physiognomy, it turned out, had a talent for the sombre. It was basically his West Ham face (post-match, soaked car park, nil–six), but in a more elevated style: the photographs showed someone taking his grief like a man while maintaining a kind of yokel hopefulness, with broadened jaw and crinkled orbits. ‘Threnody’, for her part, was unveiled but still in the strictest black. Out on the cliffs together, with the breakers exploding steeple-high, they were an arresting study, ‘Threnody’, a woman who knew how to suffer (and endure, and avenge), under the burly arm of a more optimistic presence, one that gazed out through the mist and the spume and trustfully awaited the white sails of the new ships.

I don’t know why we go up there
, said Lionel from under his baseball cap when Des passed him on the twenty-first floor of Avalon Tower (Des coming home, Lionel off out).
Why do we bother? She didn’t know me from ‘Threnody
’. Lionel spoke further about ‘Threnody’.
Oh she loves it. Says being a tragedy queen’s good for her poetry books. You know, for they sales
.

… Grace talking, Uncle Li?

Oh yeah. Talking to the ceiling. About Tommo. About Gunther
.

Mm. Doing the dads
. Tommo, or Tomorbataar: father of Ringo. Gunther: father of Stuart (pronounced
Goonter
by Stuart and
Gunter
by Gran, with Lionel settling for the no-nonsense
Gumfer
).
Be back to Dominic in a minute
, said Des.
You could follow what she said then?

Yeah, if you bent over. Gurgling on about Tommo and bleeding Gunther
. Lionel adjusted the peak of his cap.
Then she’ll say something really … really
mad.

What, when her language goes funny?

Yeah well I’ll give her funny. She said – and it stuck in me mind. She said … she said
, Insect violation?
Like it was a question. Then she said
, Six, six, six … Insect violation?
Now what the fuck’s
that
meant to mean?

Search me, Uncle Li
.

Here. I worked it out
. Lionel gave his pumpkin grin, and explained. Unless the Hammers won their next two games (away to Chelsea, away to Manchester United), they’d be doomed to relegation by Christmas.

Me new image, Des. It’s killing me with the skirt. And who can blame them? These birds want a bloke with a bit of the devil in him, not … Not the good son. The grieving father. The caring partner – with his empathy. Not the sad cunt who gives a fuck about West Ham. Des, it’s killing me with the DILFs
.

But you’re uh, you’re sticking it out with ‘Threnody’, Uncle Li?

With Lynndie? Yeah. She says another four months. Four
months
… I’m forever blowing bubbles, eh Des? Jesus
.

And, no, Lionel never did take that financial interest in West Ham United Football Club.

The three Pepperdines went up there in mid December (and again in mid January). Cilla was profoundly impressed by her forty-five-year-old great-grandmother; and Grace, too, seemed struck. Falling silent, she gazed at the eager figure held there at the bedside; again and again the baffled creases of her brow hesitantly rearranged themselves; and then her mouth (now bent in a tick, like the Nike logo) sought the shape of a smile. With Cilla reaching up to her.

Des believed that this was the true measure of his daughter: the way she reached up to the old (or to the old-seeming – she did it everywhere), her softly moved and forgiving look as she reached up to them.

They were leaving. Grace took Dawn’s hand.
Hello, dear
, she said and averted her face as if for a kiss.
Cilla was a difficult birth. Well. She
was
my first. And I was only twelve. Cilla, difficult. John, Paul, George – easy. Ringo, a bit difficult. Stuart – easy. But Lionel. You remember those knights in the olden days? It was like having one of them. He turned me inside out, he did. Lionel came in full armour. Goodbye, dear
.

In February, under a day-long downpour, John, Paul, George, Ringo, and Stuart drove to Cape Wrath for their biennial visit in Stuart’s two-door VW Lupo.

In the small hours of March 2, the police were called to the Welkway residence at 44 Blagstock Road, where they dealt with a
domestic
involving Marlon and Gina and Gina’s youngest sister, little Foozaloo. Gina was treated for hypothermia. It was twelve degrees below, and she had been locked out on the roof in her underwear.

The announcement came in late April. ‘Threnody’ and Lionel Asbo had agreed on a trial separation.
They find they are unable to get past the loss of Lovechild
: this was what Dawn and Des read in the press release.
They desperately want to make it work
, Megan Jones was widely quoted as saying.
There are only the tenderest feelings on both sides
. For now, ‘Threnody’ returned to her rented mews house off Kensington High Street. Lionel stayed on at ‘Wormwood Scrubs’.
They remain very close
, said Sebastian Drinker.
To be honest, Lionel’s taking it hardest. First the loss of Lovechild, now the loss of ‘Threnody’. It’s tearing him apart
.